Tag Archive for 'Marriage'

During the recent US presidential election, California voted to change it’s state constitution to exclude gay couples from being married (proposition 8). Prior to the election, the Californian supreme court had overturned a regular law that banned gay marriage as being unconstitutional. Thus the (successful) move by social conservatives to change the state’s constitution.

Via Andrew Sullivan (1, 2, 3, 4) and in a demonstration of the move towards David Brin’s “Transparent Society,” I give you http://www.eightmaps.com where you can see the names, addresses, employer and amount donated of everybody that gave money to the proposition 8 campaign, all arranged on a Google Maps mash-up.

In another great example of bouncing topics around in the often-academic blogs, we have this:

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers wrote an article for Cato Unbound: “Marriage and the Market“. Here is a brief summary of their idea (the exact snippet chosen is stolen directly from Arnold Kling):

So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption…the key today is consumption complementarities – activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives “hedonic marriage”.

…Hedonic marriage is different from productive marriage. In a world of specialization, the old adage was that “opposites attract,” and it made sense for husband and wife to have different interests in different spheres of life. Today, it is more important that we share similar values, enjoy similar activities, and find each other intellectually stimulating. Hedonic marriage leads people to be more likely to marry someone of their similar age, educational background, and even occupation. As likes are increasingly marrying likes, it isn’t surprising that we see increasing political pressure to expand marriage to same-sex couples.

…the high divorce rates among those marrying in the 1970s reflected a transition, as many married the right partner for the old specialization model of marriage, only to find that pairing hopelessly inadequate in the modern hedonic marriage.

It produced a flurry of responses and reactions, but the chain I want to follow is this one:

Which finally brings me to why I wrote this entry. I love this sentence from Tyler:

Symbolic goods usually have marginal values higher than their marginal costs of production; Americans for instance love the idea of their flags but the cloth is pretty cheap, especially if it comes from China.